Sunday, December 6, 2015

Every day new social experiments seem to be taking place all over the world. While the intention behind some is to poke fun and others to test our humanity, more and more continue to surface that end up offering some very inspirational results. The most recent one that I happened to come across was conducted by Shea Glover, an 18 year old high school student from Chicago, Illinois.

Equipped with her camera, Shea stopped random individuals and got them to pose in front of her lens telling them “I’m taking pictures of things I find beautiful.” The end result? Some of the most humbling and genuine moments of how much of an impact being complimented can have on our state of being.

Through her YouTube channel, Shea clarified her true intentions behind what turned into a social experiment:

I want to clarify that my intentions were not to get a reaction out of people. I was simply filming beauty and this is the result.

Here are a series of still images from the shoot:

Those captured within the video are all members of the high school that Shea attends in Chicago, some are students and faculty that she knows, while others she did not know at all. To see all of the reactions, I encourage you to check out the full video that Shea put together:

In my opinion, we live in a world where our perception of beauty has become so skewed that, what we are encouraged to strive for isn’t even attainable. As a result of this skewed idea of beauty, so many of us seem to inflict so much hatred upon ourselves and our outward appearance, a hatred that in every single case is not justified.

What I particularly appreciate about Shea’s social experiment is that it candidly captured how much our energy shifts when we feel good about ourselves. It’s our challenge now to recognize this and realize that we don’t need a compliment from someone else to appreciate the beauty that we all naturally have.

Take this opportunity to look at yourself in the mirror, love what you see reflecting back at you, and let that confidence radiate into everything that you do.